André Bazin (1918-1958) is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as with being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. In 1951 Bazin co-founded and became editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, the single most influential critical periodical in the history of the cinema. Among the film critics who came under his tutelage there were four who would go on to become the most renowned directors of the postwar French cinema: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. Bazin can also be considered the principal instigator of the equally influential auteur theory: the idea that, since film is an art form, the director of a movie must be perceived as the chief creator of its unique cinematic style.

Unlike nearly all the other authors of major film theories—and Bazin was the realist among them—he was a working or practical critic who wrote regularly about individual films. Bazin based his criticism on the film actually made rather than on any preconceived aesthetic or sociological principles; and for the first time with him, film theory therefore became not a matter of pronouncement or prescription, but of description, analysis, and deduction. Indeed, Bazin can be regarded as the aesthetic link between film critics and film theorists.

Regrettably, André Bazin died tragically young of leukemia in 1958. Yet he left much material behind, all of which is now duly noted and annotated, for the first time, in this book’s comprehensive bibliography of writings by Bazin and about Bazin, in all languages. Also featuring a contextual introduction to Bazin’s life and work, Bazin on Film: An Annotated Bibliography represents a major contribution to the still growing discipline of cinema studies, as well as a testament to the continuing influence of one of the world’s pre-eminent critical thinkers.